Primary Colors

Shonda Rhimes’s “Scandal” and the diversity debate.

Kerry Washington stars as a political fixer—and former mistress to the President—in ABC’s “Scandal.”Credit Illustration by Autumn Whitehurst

“Scandal,” the new ABC series created by Shonda Rhimes and starring Kerry Washington, is the first network TV drama with a black female lead character since 1974. That was the year of “Get Christie Love!,” a blaxploitation-inflected crime series starring Teresa Graves—best known for the catchphrase “You’re under arrest, sugar.” If you want to have your sensibilities shaken up, check out the top clip on YouTube: while undercover as a street hooker, Love is solicited by a customer. When she rejects him, he sneers, “Nigger.” Strutting away, she tosses off a comeback: “Nigger-lover!”

Thirty-eight years have passed, but, in certain ways, little has changed. Shonda Rhimes, who created “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Private Practice,” is still the sole prominent black female showrunner in television. (The most powerful black male showrunner is Tyler Perry, on TBS.) Although the heroine of “Scandal,” Olivia Pope, would never go in for Christie Love’s salty back talk, the two do share some qualities: they are incorruptible superprofessionals, worshipped and desired by everyone around them. Pope, once the President’s most trusted aide and, for a while, his secret mistress, is now the biggest fixer in Washington. (Her career is based on that of a real person: Judy Smith, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney and deputy press secretary in George H. W. Bush’s White House.) In other political narratives, the fixer might be a cynical alcoholic, or a gleeful player like Gloria Allred. Not Pope. She’s the BlackBerry-wielding flack as avenging angel. Her employees, each of whom she’s rescued from rock bottom, describe themselves as “gladiators in suits”; they say that their boss “wears the white hat.” Despite, or perhaps because of, these dollops of praise, Pope comes off as a bit of a buzzkill, all glares and Sorkinesque lectures, eyes welling with righteousness.

It’s a shame, because the series started surprisingly well. Like House, and Bones, and Monk, Pope is a fetishized genius of intuition—she has a “gut” that tells her who is lying and the brass to blackmail her way to justice. With its split screens, booming seventies R. & B. soundtrack, and Washington herself in heels (the actress is so beautiful that she’s practically a special effect), “Scandal” felt, at first, like a goofy thrill ride. But, five episodes in, I’ve lost faith. Pope’s team of scandal-handlers is so blah I remember them by nicknames: Expository McBeal, Fast Talker, Torture Geek, Nice Suits, and Desmond from “Lost.” Their weekly cases (a closeted soldier, a date rape, a plane crash) begin brightly enough, then chip, like cheap paint, turning corny and manipulative.

The show’s best character in the early episodes was Amanda Tanner (played with poignant instability by Liza Weil), a White House staffer who claimed to be pregnant by the President. Pope was hired to shut Tanner up, but she ended up taking her on as a client; it looked as though we were about to trace the emergence of a nouveau Lewinsky (or maybe of a mistress-solidarity movement). Instead, in the fifth episode, Tanner was whacked, transforming the show into a locked-Oval Office mystery—an idea that sounds fun, and would be, if the suspects weren’t such venal cartoons. As Tanner’s body was dragged from a lake, Washington made her face of dimpled torment, but, by that point, like the captain of the Costa Concordia, I had jumped ship.

In this overheated context, Olivia Pope’s ethnicity is a non-issue; the show never refers to it. This places “Scandal” in contrast to “The Good Wife,” another network procedural, but one that is set in an Obama-haunted Chicago, and quite explicit about racial politics, as well as about institutional racism and white guilt. This year, “The Good Wife” featured a fascinating plot in which the scandal-tainted state’s attorney Peter Florrick (Chris Noth) fired several black staffers but retained his white deputy, Cary (Matt Czuchry), because, consciously or unconsciously, he felt closer to him; it was the first time I’d seen such subtle biases explored onscreen. Rhimes takes a more swashbuckling approach, which has its own pleasures: in “Scandal,” the President is a Republican who fights to pass the DREAM act and has a gay chief of staff. His Vice-President is female, a fundamentalist Christian and Tea Party loyalist. Rhimes has been obsessed with the mistress’s point of view in every show she’s written, but maybe in D.C. that obsession makes sense. (If you’re having an affair with the President, rather than with McDreamy, it actually is a big deal.) Yet, while Rhimes cuts and pastes freely from the modern electoral playbook, she has built a world in which not only does Obama not exist but neither do his race-baiting opponents. Like Cary, Pope’s an insider, “one of us”: her exceptional presence both overrides and renders invisible any racial tensions—so far, at any rate. (To its credit, “Scandal” at least gives its President a party affiliation, unlike HBO’s coy “Veep.”)

It’s possible that “Scandal” ’s post-racial fantasy will feel refreshing, for black viewers and non-black ones, in varying ways. It removes the weight of both race and racism: Pope is never referred to as the “first black” anything, and though she attracts powerful white men (and no black ones), they would never spit epithets, like Christie Love’s john, when she rejects them. And yet there’s no way to discuss the show without acknowledging this tactical peculiarity, especially as “Scandal” arrives at a time when TV is embroiled in a debate about diversity, much of it targeting “Girls,” the HBO comedy, which, aside from its female showrunner, has more in common with “Louie” or “Bored to Death” than with “Scandal.” Almost none of the hand-wringing writeups on the subject have talked about “Scandal,” since it’s the type of show the TV digerati don’t care about: it’s network, it’s formulaic, and it fits squarely in the feminine junk drawer, with “Grey’s Anatomy,” chick lit, and women’s magazines, where few consumers go looking for artistry or deep meaning.

Still, the discussion has got a lot wrong. It is true that TV is run by white men (as are, of course, the publications that print the pieces bemoaning that fact). It’s also true that sitcoms, specifically, have a history of featuring white ensembles that are often, as with “Seinfeld,” based on the creators’ friends. Yet current casting is not so monolithic, and it varies from cable to network, from sick-joke satire to earnest heart-tugger. Nearly all modern sitcoms include at least one character of color: “Happy Endings,” “Modern Family,” “The Office,” “New Girl,” “Up All Night,” “2 Broke Girls,” “Community,” “The Big Bang Theory,” “Archer,” “Parks and Recreation,” “30 Rock,” “Whitney,” “Are You There, Chelsea?,” “Don’t Trust the B—in Apt 23,” and “Suburgatory” among them. Some of these ensembles click gorgeously, as in “Happy Endings,” with its sharp, funny interracial marriage. Others are blandly homeopathic—offering up a drop of color to ward off criticism—or employ gross stereotypes, like “2 Broke Girls.” What’s lacking in current TV isn’t black characters but all-black ensembles on channels other than BET or TBS—sitcoms like the eighties’ and nineties’ “A Different World” and “Living Single” and “The Cosby Show,” or like the edgier array of seventies series, including “Good Times,” in which black characters were able to fill every role: joker, princess, villain, nerd.

Part of the reason for this may be commercial: in today’s splintered TV market, audiences didn’t bite on “Undercovers” (last year’s spy drama about a married black couple) or HBO’s “No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” (a sweet, languorous series set in Botswana). And surely one reason that viewers took so long to catch on to HBO’s “The Wire” was all those black male faces. The solution is not so easy as “Can’t her best friend be black?”—a question that is posed in a blunt, funny scene on “The L.A. Complex,” the new Canadian-made CW series about aspiring Hollywood entertainers. An aging white actress, informed that the “best friend” role she wanted to try out for would be cast black to “really reflect reality,” blurts out, “I mean, who has a black best friend, right? Like, in real life, if you’re trying to be all authentic?” She turns to the room full of unsmiling black actresses and asks, “Do any of you have a white best friend? No? Right.” (“The L.A. Complex” makes its own breakthrough in the next episode: a hot kiss between two black men.)

Of course, black and white are not the only colors of diversity. In recent years, there’s been a startling, largely unheralded boom of South Asian characters, thanks to writers and actors such as “The Office” ’s Mindy Kaling, “Parks and Recreation” ’s Aziz Ansari, and “Community” ’s Danny Pudi, along with characters on “Smash,” “The Big Bang Theory,” “Whitney,” and “The Good Wife.” (At times I’ve wondered if this isn’t a psychic workaround: is brown safer than black?) Workplace procedurals—whose settings lend themselves to color-blind casting—have been comparatively diverse since the nineteen-eighties. Although George Clooney got all the press, the deepest and most original character in the début season of “ER” was Eriq La Salle’s repressed Dr. Peter Benton, the first idiosyncratic (and, significantly, the first flawed) black man I remember seeing on TV.

Shonda Rhimes’s melodramas may not be my cup of tea, but they have been havens for racial variety. On “Grey’s Anatomy,” Sandra Oh’s Cristina Yang stands out like Peter Benton: not because she is Asian but because she is Yang—a prickly egotist, not always likable, but with a mordant wit that makes her lovable nonetheless. Olivia Pope’s greatest character defect is her sexual history with the President, but that just suggests she’s a woman worth risking the White House for. It’s a regrettably big deal that a black woman plays the heroine of “Scandal,” and not the heroine’s best friend—and, for that reason alone, I’d wish for the show to succeed. (Far lamer cop shows hit the jackpot each year; a bad show that makes money can set more of a precedent than a good one.) But, so far, Pope has shown no wit, no looseness, no eccentricity. The more people praise her, the more exceptional she becomes—and the less human. ♦